Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007 (Urbanomic/Sequence Press)

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Land had the most brilliantly seductive and meteoric mind, endlessly imaginative and capable of adopting, inhabiting and discarding any philosophical position. With him—and rightly so—philosophy infected every area of life. Beginning with Land’s early radical rereadings of Heidegger, Nietzsche, Kant and Bataille, the volume collects together the papers, talks and articles of the mid-90s—long the subject of rumour and vague legend (including some work which has never previously appeared in print)—in which Land developed his futuristic theory-fiction of cybercapitalism gone amok; and ends with his enigmatic later writings in which Ballardian fictions, poetics, cryptography, anthropology, grammatology and the occult are smeared into unrecognisable hybrids. Harman, Graham (2011). The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. re.press. ISBN 978-0980668346– via Google Books.

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As in Steven Shaviro, some version of cognition, or perhaps information, exceeds the human. “Information revolution has nothing to do with ideas.” (405) And: “Thought is a function of the real, something that matter can do.” (322) Virtual materialism becomes a project to realize artificial intelligence. “Far from exhibiting itself to human academic endeavor as a scientific object, AI is a meta-scientific control system and an invader, with all the insidiousness of planetary techno-capital flipping over.” (236) The Thirst For Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (An Essay in Atheistic Religion) (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) [22]Beginning with Land's radical rereadings of Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Kant, and ending with Professor Barker's cosmic theory of geo-trauma and neo-qabbalistic attempts to formulate a numerical anti-language, Fanged Noumena rescues from obscurity papers, talks and articles some of which have never previously appeared in print. Long the subject of rumour and vague legend, Land's turbulent post-genre theory-fictions of cybercapitalist meltdown smear cyberpunk, philosophy, arithmetic, poetics, cryptography, anthropology, grammatology, and the occult into unrecognisable and gripping hybrids. He has insisted that he has no recollection of most of these old writings, and intimated that he simply couldn't sustain that drug-fueled love for all things chaos. Fair enough. And I can't help but suspect that he's underestimated the force of the Logos - certainly enough to be caught up in it today, anyway. I tend to delve into transgressive thought-spirals myself, but my skepticism here ensures that I'm not a radical materialist at the end of the day... certainly not while biopower continues to be wielded so violently by world economic and political powers. For the old Land, no human violence could ever be violent "enough". I'm not so sure. But Fanged Noumena may very well be the most vital (anti-)philosophical project of our times, for better or worse, complete with a personality cult that could one day rank up there with that of a Nietzsche, always invigorating as he was problematic.

Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings, 1987–2007 - Goodreads

In 1992, he published The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism. [12] Land published an abundance of shorter texts, many in the 1990s during his time with the CCRU. [6] The majority of these articles were compiled in the retrospective collection Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007, published in 2011. MIT Press Direct is a distinctive collection of influential MIT Press books curated for scholars and libraries worldwide. Land's work with CCRU, as well as his pre-Dark Enlightenment writings, have all been influential to the political philosophy of accelerationism, an idea resembling that of the "fatal strategy" of "ecstasy" in the earlier work of Jean Baudrillard, where "a system is abolished only by pushing it into hyperlogic, by forcing it into an excessive practice which is equivalent to a brutal amortization." Along with the other members of CCRU, Land wove together ideas from the occult, cybernetics, science fiction, and poststructuralist philosophy to try to describe the phenomena of techno-capitalist acceleration.

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For the replicants, money is not a matter of possession, but of liquidity / deterritorialization, and all the monetary processes of earth are open to their excitement, irrespective of ownership.” (377) As in Randy Martin, money is understood as volatility, unmoored from representing value. “… what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from the enemy’s resources. Digito-commodification is the index of cyber-positively escalating techno-virus, of the planetary techno-capital singularity: a self-organizing insidious traumatism, virtually guiding the entire biological desiring-complex towards post-carbon replicator usurpation.” (338) Established in 1962, the MIT Press is one of the largest and most distinguished university presses in the world and a leading publisher of books and journals at the intersection of science, technology, art, social science, and design.

Fanged Noumena by Nick Land - Penguin Books Australia Fanged Noumena by Nick Land - Penguin Books Australia

Fanged Noumena is a dizzying trip through land’s rigorous, incisive and provocative work, establishing it as an indispensable resource for radically inhuman thought in the twenty-first century. Noys, Benjamin (2014). Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism. Zero Books. ISBN 9781782793007. Capitalism as a mind-virus that has captured humanity and is willing its evolution into existence from the future. Runaway processes in a network that overpower any counterforce. Societies of Control are PROGRAMMATIC. The universe. Is. Programmatic.The expo is perhaps the most archetypal mass art form of modernity, with its enthusiastic mingling of colonial products and advanced machinery within the envelope of national triumph. For a while, it evolved with every leap in the forces of production, particularly electrification. But the expos also express the internal tensions of modernity. In Paris in 1937, the Soviet and Nazi pavilions, “extolled totalitarian solutions to the decadence of modernity, and the sweeping clean of a ruined world.” (107) Long the subject of rumor and vague legend, Land’s turbulent post-genre theory-fictions of cybercapitalist meltdown smear cyberpunk, philosophy, arithmetic, poetics, cryptography, anthropology, grammatology and the occult into unrecognizable and gripping hybrids. Beginning with Land’s radical rereadings of Heidegger, Nietzsche and Kant, Fanged Noumena terminates in Professor Barker’s cosmic theory of geo-trauma and neo-qabbalistic attempts to formulate a numerical anti-language. Land “Only proto-capitalism has ever been critiqued.” (340) Socialism can’t quite grasp what for Land is capital 2.0, or for me the vector. “The forces of production are going for the revolution on their own.” (341) By now Land has firmly diverged from any Marxisant path, the farewell to which is side-eye at transcendental miserablism: “the decaying Hegelian socialist heritage clinging with increasing desperation to the theological sentimentalities of praxis, reification, alienation, ethics, autonomy and other such mythemes of human creative sovereignty.” (294) The various flavors of western Marxism gave up on an affirmative counter economics. Wallowing in a limitless cosmic despair in its place. “Transcendental Miserablism constitutes itself as an impregnable mode of negation…. [W]ith economics and history comprehensively abandoned, all that survives of Marx is a psychological bundle of resentments and disgruntlements.” (624)

Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987 - 2007 - Goodreads Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987 - 2007 - Goodreads

Land is also known for later developing the anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic ideas behind neo-reaction and the Dark Enlightenment, which he named.

Collected Writings 1987–2007

Machinic Postmodernism: Complexity, Technics and Regulation (with Keith Ansell-Pearson& Joseph A. McCahery) (SAGE Publications, 1996) the attempt to read Deleuze (and Guattari) without the vitalism of Bergson and instead with this Nietzschean anti-vitalism (of the will) is a fascinating failure. the well-rehearsed productions with cyberpunk and neo-Lovecraftian toy kits are nothing more than disorientation before the exit sign in postmodernity's hall of mirrors, self-satisfaction oozing out between the panes. as much an experiment in non-standard thought as a child courting a throw-up is a dervish. The next article, Machinic Desire, ups the ante at once, as it begins with literal, actual Blade Runner fanfiction: He obtained a PhD in the University of Essex under David Farrell Krell, with a thesis on Heidegger's 1953 essay Die Sprache im Gedicht, which is about Georg Trakl's work. [9] In 1992, he published The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism. Land published an abundance of shorter texts, many in the 1990s during his time with the CCRU. The majority of these articles were compiled in the retrospective collection Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007, published in 2011.